out loud.
Ahead and to the left he could see a break in the line of doors: the entrance to one of the midships lobbies. This would lead to the port corridor and his suite. He stumbled through the door.
The lobby consisted of a brace of elevators opposite a cozy lounge with oak bookcases and wing chairs. At this late hour, the place was deserted. Bitterman hesitated, sniffing. There was a smell in the air here—a smell like smoke. For a moment, his sense of lazy euphoria receded: he’d attended enough safety drills to know that fire was a ship’s worst danger. But this scent was unusual. It was like incense, or, more precisely, the joss sticks he had once smelled in a Nepalese restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
More slowly now, he walked through the lobby to the port corridor that lay beyond. It was very quiet, and he could both hear and feel the deep thrum of the ship’s diesels far below his feet. The smell was stronger here—much stronger. The strange, musky perfume was combined with other, deeper, far less pleasant scents—moldy fungus, maybe, along with something he couldn’t identify. He paused, frowning. Then, taking one look back at the lobby, he turned into the port corridor.
And stopped abruptly, inebriation vanishing in an instant.
Up ahead lay the source of the odor: a dark cloud of smoke that blocked his path down the corridor. Yet it was like no smoke he had ever seen, strangely opaque, with a dense, dark grayish color and a rib-like outer surface that reminded him—in some bizarre and unpleasant way—of
Paul Bitterman drew in his breath with an audible rasp. Something was wrong here—very wrong.
Smoke was supposed to
He felt his heart suddenly accelerate with fear. Was it his imagination, or did the thick cloud have the
And it was then the thing slowly stretched out its ragged arms and—with a horrible, undulant purpose—began to move slowly toward him.
“No!” he shouted. “NO! Keep away!
The desperate shouts that followed quickly opened stateroom doors up and down the port-side corridor of Deck 9. There was a brief, electric moment of silence. And then, the sound of gasps; shrieks; the thud of a fainting body collapsing on the carpet; the frantic slamming of doors. Bitterman heard none of it. All his attention, every fiber of his being, was riveted to the monstrous thing that glided closer, ever closer . . .
And then it was past.
37
LESEUR STARED FROM HENTOFF TO KEMPER AND BACK AGAIN. He was already feeling aggrieved that the commodore had shoved this problem onto his plate—he was a ship’s officer, after all, not some casino employee. Not only that, but this problem wouldn’t go away—it just kept getting worse. With at least one murder, and perhaps as many as three, he had more dangerous and alarming things to deal with than this. He shifted his stare from Hentoff to Kemper and back again.
“Let me make sure I’ve gotten this right,” he said. “You’re telling me this Pendergast fellow contrived for the card counters to lose a million pounds at the blackjack tables, in the process raking in almost three hundred thousand for himself.”
Hentoff nodded. “That’s about it, sir.”
“It seems to me that you just got fleeced, Mr. Hentoff.”
“No, sir,” said Hentoff, a frosty note in his voice. “Pendergast had to win in order to make them lose.”
“Explain.”
“Pendergast started off by tracking the shuffle—a technique in which you observe a full shoe of play, memorizing the positions of certain critical cards or groupings, called slugs, and then follow them through the shuffle, visually. He also managed to get a glimpse of the bottom card, and since he was offered the cut, he was able to place that card inside the deck exactly where he wanted it.”
“Doesn’t sound possible.”
“These are well-known, if exceedingly difficult, techniques. This Pendergast seems to have mastered them better than most.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Pendergast needed to win to make them lose.”
“By knowing where certain cards were, and combining that with a counting system, he was able to control the cards going ‘downstream’ to the rest of the players by either jumping into a game or sitting it out—as well as by taking unnecessary hits.”
LeSeur nodded slowly, taking this in.
“He
to shortstop the good cards in order to let bad ones go downstream. To make the others lose, he had to win.”
“I get it,” said LeSeur sourly. “And so you want to know what to do about this man’s winnings?”
“That’s right.”
LeSeur thought for a moment. It all came down to how Commodore Cutter would react when he heard about this—which, of course, he would eventually have to. The answer was not good. And when Corporate heard about it, they would be even less sympathetic. One way or another, they had to get the money back.
He sighed. “For the sake of all of our futures with the company, you need to get that money back.”
“How?”
LeSeur turned his weary face away. “Just do it.”
Thirty minutes later, Kemper walked down the plush corridor of Deck 12, Hentoff in tow, feeling a clammy sweat building inside his dark suit. He stopped before the door of the Tudor Suite.
“You sure this is the right time for this?” Hentoff asked. “It’s eleven P.M.”
“I didn’t get the sense LeSeur wanted us to wait,” Kemper replied. “Did you?” Then he turned to the door and knocked.
“Come in,” came a distant voice.
